13

ROCKETRY

Sun Ra would soon leave Chicago, the place that gave birth to the Arkestra and its willfully futuristic sounds, and he would never return. Abraham had been casting about for gigs farther afield, maybe Birmingham or New York. A 1958 performance in Indianapolis turned out well—even if the band never got paid—yielding a lost but legendary recording with Wes Montgomery and a young Freddie Hubbard sitting in.1 In July 1961, when the band got an offer to play a club in Montreal known as El Morocco, it seemed as good a reason as any to leave the South Side and its diminishing opportunities. Sun Ra gathered his core musicians—Gilmore, Boykins, and Marshall Allen (the indomitable alto saxophonist began his lifelong tenure with the Arkestra in 1958 playing flute)—and enlisted several others: Billy Mitchell on drums, Walter Strickland on trumpet, and the singer Ricky Murray.² After only two days, apparently, the club owner fired the band for playing unlistenable material, which he called “God’s music.”³ Sun Ra refused to return to Chicago. The Arkestra found work at a mountain resort, Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon, some sixty miles north, until a hipster coffee shop called The Place brought them back to Montreal for several weeks.4 Canada proved a fickle patron. By the end of the year, the ensemble would relocate to New York.

The Arkestra left an astonishing stockpile of recordings behind in Chicago, fuel to propel them through the coming decade, if not quite the stratosphere. Abraham was a busy recording engineer in the late fifties, almost as inspired as Sun Ra. Jazz in Silhouette saw release on El Saturn in 1959, but the session it came from produced twice as many tracks. Masters from the doomed second Transition session were still looking for a home. Sun Ra usually ran tape at rehearsals, and the results often proved worthy of release. Such tracks pepper later El Saturn LPs. Live club recordings were a regular occurrence, sometimes disappearing only to surface again years later.⁵ Abraham and Sun Ra used recording as much to document as to commodify the Arkestra’s sound. In their hands, the tape recorder became a DIY memory machine with commercial applications. About a year before leaving Chicago, the Arkestra recorded a marathon session at an unusual location, the Elks hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An arduous day of playing yielded between thirty and forty tunes, enough for a spate of LPs. A quarter of the track titles betray an outer-space touch, with several of them copyrighted together under the title “Space Loneliness: A Sound Concerto.”⁶ Space provided Sun Ra room for innovative composition. The recordings the Arkestra made before leaving Chicago reveal an ensemble launching to new heights of creativity, imagination, and excitement.

The release of those recordings obscures that impression, however. Completed by 1960, they would appear piecemeal or in small groups over the next decade on a variety of El Saturn LPs. Discontinuity governs the relationship between the recording and the release of any given LP. Tunes recorded in Chicago might appear years later, long after the band had landed in New York, in 1961, or even Philadelphia, in 1968. A kind of time travel characterizes these records. The “new” music they contain could be years old. In a sense, they play in double stereo, with both a temporal and an auditory channeling. An underlying discontinuity between now and then (release and recording) doubles that between left and right, an effect strangely enriching for the futuristic sounds of Sun Ra. New music is already old. Sounds from the future come from the past. Tomorrow’s music loops through yesterday to arrive today, years after its creation. What does it mean to hear time’s dissonance, the slippage of history into its future, our present? The time travel induced by El Saturn LPs released after the Arkestra’s departure from Chicago disrupts history as a preferred means of receiving knowledge, even in musical form. Music of the past and future occur in a present that opens in both directions, dispersing the securities of historical knowledge.

Corbett rightly claims that Sun Ra preferred nonlinear modes of thought and expression: “A deep disturbance of temporal-historical relationships was perhaps what Sun Ra was after, aided by a somewhat disorganized and on-the-fly business practice.”7 The apparently haphazard release of El Saturn LPs containing music recorded years earlier defies time as a medium for both expression and, equally, cognition. Sun Ra sometimes defended Saturn’s quaint habits of production and distribution by insisting that it would release music when the world was ready for it, not before. Convenient as that explanation is, it bears pondering. If the value of music derives from its relation not to the accident of its historical production but to its own potential, then time ceases to determine its efficacy. Music opens to space as the medium of its agency, the abstract space of its occurrence as sound. Space music disrupts time, diffusing history into the resounding force of recorded sound. El Saturn records launched the Arkestra through time into outer space.

And they did so at precisely the historical moment when America became engrossed in manned space flight. By the time the Arkestra reached Montreal, a Russian had reached outer space: Yuri Gagarin, whose 108-minute single orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961, transformed the heroes of the Space Age from mindless drones (or cute animals) to living men. Satellites were out and cosmonauts were in, or so it seemed to a US administration fearful of losing the space race for good. With Gagarin’s flight, the Soviets scored a second victory that left the United States decidedly in second place. As a payload, Vostok 1, Gagarin’s craft, was massive in comparison to Sputnik 1. At 10,417 pounds, it approximated the weight of thermonuclear warheads, such as those intended for America’s own intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Atlas, which in late 1958 had lofted the then heaviest artificial object into orbit, a communications satellite. But the Soviet rocket propelled a human being into space. Heavy ballistics now had a face, and it was Russian. The newly elected US president, John F. Kennedy, who rode into office in 1960 partly on a wave of resentment over Eisenhower’s perceived humiliation by a bleeping metal spheroid (Sputnik), needed a bold initiative if the nation was to remain in the running for mastery in outer space, not to mention global politics. Project Mercury was months away from a manned orbital launch. Kennedy decided to commit his credibility—and the nation’s resources—to a visionary goal that, if achieved, would bury the Soviet Union in its own rhetoric of technoscientific and political superiority.

Before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, Kennedy unfurled a banner that would wave over America for a decade, declaring his belief that its future would be decided in space: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.”8 A Soviet satellite, Luna 3, had circled the Moon on the second anniversary of Sputnik, beaming back to Earth the first photographs of the dark side of the lunar surface.⁹ America could become a leader only by placing first in an enterprise grander than either manned Earth orbit or lunar reconnaissance. It should therefore, in Kennedy’s decisive words, “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”¹⁰ Kennedy stressed both the ambition and the expense necessary to rocket a man to the moon. His challenge to Congress and America would require a huge investment of labor and money in a cause that would indeed transform the nation—but for the better?

Sun Ra thought not. His own space program aimed at something higher than a lunar landing: blasting humans to infinity on a fiery counterthrust of sound. The Kennedy administration preferred more conventional aims and means. It would place a man first in orbit, à la Gagarin’s mission, and then, more dramatically, on the moon. Doing so would require rockets, big ones, capable of lifting heavy payloads beyond the grasp of gravity. Such rockets had swarmed the technicolor covers of science-fiction magazines and paperbacks long before the first V-2 missile cleared the English Channel to fall on London in 1944. Engineering them to exceed escape velocity (about 25,000 miles per hour) while carrying the personnel and gear necessary for a moon shot would require extraordinary technological and scientific acumen. Building them would require technocratic coordination of labor and design. The Eisenhower administration had already inaugurated three programs devoted to the goal of manned spaceflight: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, involving one, two, and three astronauts, respectively. Kennedy’s contribution was the deadline: a walk on the moon by the end of the sixties.

Rocket development was the key. Through skullduggery and luck, America had acquired the services of the great rocket designer and visionary Wernher von Braun, some of his associates, and a stockpile of V-2s when Allied forces captured Peenemünde, Hitler’s rocket facility. Von Braun headed the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, located in Huntsville, Alabama, one of several teams scrambling to match Soviet advances in heavy ballistics. His design for the Redstone rocket, named for Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal, descended directly from the V-2 and would become the basis for a family of highly dependable rockets that included the Mercury-Redstone, used for the first two manned spaceflights (both suborbital), and the Jupiter-C, a modified and much larger Redstone that carried Explorer 1, the first US satellite, into orbit. The decision to use something other than a Redstone for the initial—failed—attempt to launch the first US satellite stemmed more from politics than from design considerations. Eager to give its space initiative a civilian profile, officials chose the US Naval Research Laboratory (more scientific than military in orientation) to develop a rocket for Explorer 1. But when the first Vanguard exploded after flying only four feet following ignition, von Braun’s mostly German team received permission to take the next shot, despite its army and wartime credentials. Their consistent success would earn them transfer from military to civilian status with the creation, in 1958, of NASA, under whose auspices they would perfect a design for the largest launch vehicle in the US stable of rockets and the one destined for the moon shot, the formidable Saturn.

Von Braun himself named the beast—alas, not after a record company out of Chicago. But the happy coincidence shows how preternaturally Abraham and Sun Ra were tuned to the times. Both Saturn initiatives, rockets and records, required unprecedented coordination of invention and work. Just because the Chicago operation flew on a shoestring without much public awareness (let alone support) doesn’t mean it lacked social significance. In fact, El Saturn Records provides an illuminating counterexample to the organizational methods necessary to the success of the Saturn rocket, the Apollo program, and the national commitment to land someone on the moon. That effort, building on innovations in the design and production of ICBMs, introduced unprecedented levels of administrative “command and control” into government management and therefore social organization. The battlefield language here seems apt, given Cold War realities. The US space program extended the administrative operations of war into peacetime by means of the complex efforts necessary to send a human to the moon.

Research and development would no longer be concentrated in the hands of prime contractors and concessionaires. It would be distributed among an array of subcontractors whose contributions could be coordinated, managed, and monitored to greatest effect.11 Engineering and building a device as complicated as an ICBM required a new approach to operations management: “systems engineering,” the design of networks to manage flow involving many parts and numerous personnel.¹² NASA served as the grand aggregator of the myriad systems involved in the design and production of the Saturn rocket and the pursuit of the moon, to the point that this project could be viewed as a model for social engineering more generally: “The space program promised a new era of great advances in the way large-scale efforts were managed, the encouragement of multidisciplinary efforts, new techniques and tools for the conduct of research in the social as well as physical sciences, and the manner in which they were applied to the solutions of age-old problems.”13 As James Webb, NASA’s director under Kennedy, stated in 1963, “Every thread in the fabric of our economic, social, and political institutions is being tested as we move into space,” and he would come to view the agency, in its capacity for coordinating diverse labors to induce social change, as a mechanism to advance “revolution from above.”¹⁴ The Saturn rocket and its moon mission helped consolidate a technocratic approach to US governance that vested authority in organizations such as NASA, agents of both continuous systems management and top-down social change. American technocracy would swallow the moon—and with any luck, Earth as well.

The other space program—El Saturn—operated by different principles, if that’s the right word. Sun Ra might have run the Arkestra like a technocrat, leveraging expert knowledge to maximize precision, but he did so not to achieve political conformity and national prowess. Instead, the Arkestra played to transport people to other worlds, tomorrow’s worlds. Sun Ra took that prospect seriously, however impish his performances in interviews or on stage could become. His band was a spaceship, his musicians were astronauts, and music propelled their audiences far beyond Earth orbit:

I and my musicians are musical astronauts. We sail the galaxies through the medium of sound, our audience with us where we go whether they want to or not. The audience might want to be earth bound, but we being space bound we bind them to us and thus they cannot resist because the space way is the better way to travel. It keeps going out, and out, and further out than that.¹⁵

Sun Ra’s emphasis on an absence of audience choice in the matter of astral travel chimes with his sense of the Arkestra as a space-bound jail. The prime mover of American liberalism, individual choice, plays no part in space travel as Sun Ra practices it. His play on the word “bound” (from “trapped” to “traveling”) releases an individual into the impersonal flight of music: out and out, beyond America, beyond the Earth, the moon, the sun, even death. Utopian as Sun Ra’s sense of space travel might seem, it remains the Cold War effect of a planned program of sonic ballistics, a willed improvement over conventional heavy thrusters: “We’re like space warriors,” Sun Ra says of his musicians. “Music can be used as a weapon, as energy. The right note or chord can transport you into space using music and energy flow. And the listeners can travel along with you.”16 That’s not a promise NASA can make.

America’s space program has been only a spectator sport, a spectacle that induces docility in its captivated audience. Sun Ra’s offers participation that pays off in joy, often in the most mundane ways—the Arkestra’s attire, for instance. Nicholas de Monchaux writes gracefully about the role clothes would play in NASA’s pursuit of the moon, specifically, a space suit designed to keep US astronauts alive in the freeze-burning vacuum of space. The contract to produce it, after cutthroat competition, went to the Playtex Company, whose women’s undergarments had achieved miracles in counteracting the effects of hostile environments on human bodies. De Monchaux’s assessment of its success against corporate competitors in creating a livable space suit is profound: the human body, in its intimate and tender particularity, proves resistant to the imperatives of systems—and hence social—engineering.¹⁷ So too do Sun Ra’s astronauts, as their space-age hats and togs prove: “Astronauts are wearing hats like that. They could wear tuxedos in outer space but they wear space suits ’cause it’s more suitable. So if I’m playin’ space music, why can’t I wear my celestial hats and things like that[?] But they want to chain a musician, where he just got to wear black all the time.”¹⁸ Sun Ra cut those sartorial chains so that his musicians can fly free. Such is the force of his poetics of outer space. Their space suits resist systems that would engineer docility: “A costume,” as Sun Ra says, “is music.”¹⁹